


Getting to Snow You

by Kam14



Series: Love & Loss [11]
Category: ER (TV 1994)
Genre: Adoption, Africa, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Chicago (City), Childhood, Childhood Friends, Dating, Gen, Memories, Roommates, Sentimental, Snow, Snow Day, South Africa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28255053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kam14/pseuds/Kam14
Summary: Kerry's unfortunate morning following a night of heavy snowfall turns into a sentimental afternoon spent with Carter after he finds some of her long-forgotten photos in the basement. (Takes place in season five after Carter has started to rent Kerry's basement).
Relationships: John Carter/Roxanne Please, Kerry Weaver/Mulungisi Nkosi
Series: Love & Loss [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2033827
Kudos: 8





	Getting to Snow You

“Up already?”, Kerry half-smirked as she entered the living room where Carter was sat, coffee in hand, watching the morning news. “Isn’t today your day off?”, she asked with a slightly furrowed brow. Carter nodded wearily. “Trust you to force me to wake you every morning when you have a shift at work”, she paused before imitating herself shouting, “ _Carter, I am not your mother. It’s six-thirty AM, now, for the love of God, will you get up_? Yet, here you are, wide awake on your day off!"

“I couldn’t sleep. I had a…erm…disagreement with my father last night over the phone. Family troubles, you know?”, he admitted. Kerry let the comment fly over her head. She didn’t know. Or, she hadn’t known for a long time, since her adoptive parents died shortly after she had finished medical school. The only thing even remotely resembling family drama that she had experienced in the recent months was an out-of-the-blue phone call—which she had missed—from someone who was supposedly her birth mother. After the initial anxiety (and she hated to admit, hope) that it had caused her, Kerry had chosen to ignore the call after all. If it was legitimate, then surely her ‘mother’ would get back in touch when she was ready.

She’d had one too many failed attempts with a less-than-efficient private investigator to try to locate her biological mother to raise her hopes too much. Plus, there had been a number of the ER staff who had been receiving unlikely phone calls since the new Chief of Emergency Medicine, Amanda Lee had taken charge. There had been Mark with the call from NASA after applying to work with them a number of _years_ ago and Doug with the call about a job opportunity as a Paeds Attending in Portland. They very well could have been legitimate. After all, Kerry had no reason to _truly_ suspect otherwise. She had only known Amanda for a handful of weeks, and she seemed pleasant and competent enough to Kerry, even if Jerry didn’t think so. Kerry had struggled at first with the aspect of competition; she had become accustomed to being in charge. However, since she had been demoted to Attending once again, she found that she had more time to concentrate on the aspects of her job that she loved and less to focus on sweating the small things and fixing all of her employee’s problems.

“Want some coffee?”, Carter offered, gesturing towards the kitchen, where he had leftover a sum of the caffeinated liquid in the pot below the coffee machine.

“No, I’m good. Thanks”, Kerry replied before making her way over to the living room window and peering out of it at the rather thick-looking snow that had fallen overnight, “I’ll get some at work. I need to leave now so that I have time to de-ice my car windscreen”.

Carter nodded in understanding. “Need a hand pulling the car out? The snow’s pretty thick”.

Kerry thought for a moment. “Okay. Let me defrost the windscreen and then you can come out and shovel some of the snow away from around the car”, she suggested before picking up her thick winter coat up off of the coat rack, donning it along with a woollen hat and scarf, and picking up her work bag from where it sat underneath the rack.

As soon as Kerry opened the front door, the cold air hit her face and made her skin tingle. She shivered, willing herself to close the door to the warm, safe haven that was her house and cautiously make her way down the stairs on her front porch. She switched the car on to generate some heat, grabbed a scraping tool from the trunk, set her crutch and bag down in the front seat, and began to scrape the stubborn ice off of the windscreen. Carter, at this point, had taken a seat on the windowsill in the living room and was watching Kerry. Once she had finished the task at hand, she turned and clocked that he was now watching her. She beckoned him to come out and help with shovelling the snow so that she had a fighting chance of being able to drive to work today.

Around twenty minutes later though, —ten of which Carter had spent shovelling snow and the remaining ten of which Kerry had used to attempt (and had failed) to drive more than a few inches away from her front porch—Kerry realised that she was not going to make it into work today after all. From her car, she made a phone call to Jerry at the admit desk, requesting that he inform Amanda she wouldn’t be able to make it into work and, once she had hung up the phone, she made her way back up the steps on her front porch once again. When she re-entered the living room, however, there was no longer any sign of Carter, but she could hear voices coming from what sounded like the back-door entrance to her house. Kerry didn’t want to pry, although she thought it was odd that Carter wouldn’t simply invite his company to come in through the front door.

Just as Kerry was hanging up her coat on the coat rack and setting her bag down underneath it again, Carter came stumbling through to the living room. In a drastic turn from his mood just a quarter-of-an-hour ago, he was laughing and embracing the woman whom Kerry recognised as Roxanne from the couple of times she had seen her at the hospital. The pair, completely oblivious of Kerry’s presence, began to lock lips rather passionately. Kerry cleared her throt in order to attract the pair’s attention and both jumped out of each other’s arms and turned to face her.

“Kerry?”, Carter asked with a wide-eyed expression, “I thought you’d gone to work”.

“The snow’s too deep and I realised that I wasn't going to be able to drive any more than a few inches in it”, Kerry replied, “I’ve already let the ER know that I won’t be making it in today”.

“You know, the el’s running”, Carter suggested. Kerry only had to roll her eyes a little and gesture to her crutch for him to understand his suggestion that she walk through deep snow to get to the el station was not a feasible one.

“Hi, Kerry”, Roxanne greeted her and smiled, “I’m really sorry about the canoodling in your living room _right in front of you_ ”, she jibed as she pursed her lips and hit Carter’s arm, “we’ll go down to the basement so that we don’t disturb you any further, won’t we, John?”

Before Kerry even had a chance to say much more, Roxanne had already dragged Carter by his arm down to the basement. Kerry, after her ordeal of a morning, had decided to spend the remainder of her day sat at her kitchen counter catching up on the past couple of days’ worth of chart review. After around two hours had passed, Carter and Roxanne emerged from the basement where he was lodging, Roxanne now wrapped in her winter gear, bag in hand and ready to leave. Kerry watched as Carter walked her to the front door and gave her an awkward kiss goodbye.

“Nice to see you again, Roxanne”, Kerry called from her seat in the kitchen.

“You too!”, Roxanne shouted back, just as she was stepping out on to the front porch and into what was now starting to become a blizzard.

“How’s Roxanne getting home?”, Kerry asked Carter as he casually emerged into the kitchen.

“She’s getting the el to work”, he answered, “I offered to walk her there, but I guess she’s had enough of me for one day”, he added with a chuckle.

“You know, if you’re going to keep inviting her over, you should really tidy up the basement a _little_ more efficiently than you have to date”, Kerry advised, taking a sip of steaming tea from the mug that she was cupping with her hands for warmth.

“I guess so”, Carter pondered. “Hey, Kerry, I think there’s a couple of storage bags of yours’ down there that are full of photos. I didn’t know what to do with them when I moved in, so I just stored them in one of the overhead cupboards. Shall I bring them upstairs so you can sort them?”

Kerry hadn’t even remembered that she had left any of her own belongings behind when Carter moved in. She hadn’t been down into the basement since after the last student whom she had been landlord to had moved out; months before Carter turned up on her doorstep in answer to her advertisement for a tenant.

“Sure”, she answered, “if you’ve got time to bring them up now, I can get started on sorting through them, seeing as I’ve pretty much finished catching up on charts”.

A few minutes later, Carter emerged into the kitchen yet again, this time, carrying two full-to-bursting plastic sacks full of old photos and trinkets from Kerry’s past.

“Wow, there sure is a lot of them”, Kerry exclaimed, surprised at just how many photographs she had held on to. “You doing anything, John?”, she asked with a hopeful expression. Carter shook his head.

“Fancy helping me sort through all of these?”, she probed, tipping the contents of one of the sacks out on to the counter before they quickly overflowed on to the floor.

“Sure”, Carter replied, as he bent down to gather some of the photographs that now lay strewn at his feet. “Wow! Kerry is that you?”, he pointed to one of two teenagers in the picture that had caught his attention. The figure he was pointing to was all too recognisable with her red hair, crutch, and inquisitive blue-grey eyes.

“Yeah”, she laughed, “that certainly is me”. She took the photo from Carter and turned it to look at the date scrawled in pencil on the back of it. “1975. I would have been around fourteen…maybe fifteen. And that’s Mlungisi. We were best friends growing up and dated for a few years when we were in our late teens before my family moved back to the US. Do you remember Mlungisi? He stopped by at County to visit me three Christmases ago when he was visiting Chicago”.

Carter looked a little puzzled for a moment, as Kerry wasn’t the type of person to share many details about her personal life with her co-workers. He had only learned that she was adopted by default because he was the one that took a message from someone who called Kerry’s house claiming to be her mother. However, he did remember Kerry jumping into Mlungisi’s arms and kissing him excitedly in the middle of the ER the Christmas after she had started working at County. All the staff had been very taken aback and fascinated all at the same time.

“Yeah, I remember him _vaguely_ ”, he lied, “I didn’t know what your relationship was with him though, or how you knew him”. He paused. “So, where abouts in Africa did you live?”

“South Africa. I grew up near a game reserve in Eastern Cape. We moved there because my adoptive parents were missionaries…well, wannabe missionaries”, she told Carter as he flicked through a selection of photos from the same album.

Kerry realised that she was, in this moment, opening up to Carter more than she had to…anybody in a number of years. She and he spent the next goodness knows how many hours chatting about the game reserve she grew up on, her adoptive parents, how she learned to speak some Zulu, and the friends that she made whilst living in South Africa (both those of whom she kept in touch with and those of whom she did not). She had started to form what she would consider an unlikely friendship with Carter since he had started renting her basement and she had to admit that sorting through these long-forgotten photos, these pieces of her past, with him was not the worst way she could be spending a snowed-in afternoon.

**Author's Note:**

> I had fun writing this chapter because I enjoy seeing a happy, more carefree season five Kerry after she becomes Attending once again after her stint as Interim/Acting Chief of Emergency Medicine. (Although, I have to admit that I like boss, take-charge Kerry as Chief a little more)! I've not gone into too much detail with regards to the discussion of Kerry's time spent growing up in Africa and dating Mlungisi but wanted to get the discussion started. (Spoiler: I have a chapter later in this series where I plan to explore that in much more depth--stay tuned)! Thanks, again, to Zoë and M for their continued encouragement this past week, even though it has been difficult in more ways than one.


End file.
